TKC 54 Ian Freed

Amazon's Kindle VP Ian Freed

News – Item 1: My telephone interview yesterday July 29 (audio incorrectly has it as “yesterday.”) with Justin D. Gawronski, a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Amazon in the wake of the Orwell snafu. Comments on the lawsuit by Andrys Basten and Abhi. Item 2: Clues to what improvements may lie ahead for the Kindle, gleaned from an online Amazon survey. Item 3: Nicholson Baker pens a mainly unfavorable review of the Kindle in this week’s edition of The New Yorker. Click here for his five books at the Kindle Store. Click here for the book that finally made his Kindle disappear, just like Jeff Bezos promised.

Tech Tips – Courtesy of Larry Goss, how to do math on your Kindle 1 or 2 and how to go directly to web links from a document on your Kindle home screen.

Interview – Amazon’s Kindle VP Ian Freed looks back on the first
618 days since the launch of the Kindle. He considers the elements of the Kindle’s “flow” state of reading. And he reveals that, although he and his team think about an international debut for the Kindle “all the time,” he can’t say it’s coming soon.

Comments – Paul Levin worries about Kindle bashing. Suzanne Levin (I think they’re related) of the Chick with Books blog gets her happy hands on a DX. Jesslyn Hendrix reports on a major upgrade to Kovid Goyal’s free eBook library program, Calibre. Mary McManus lusts for the rumored Apple tablet especially if it will include a Pixel Qi screen. An audio commenter from Oregon urges you to consider asking for a price rebate on the Kindle 2 even if you bought one more than a month before Amazon dropped the price by $60.

Next week’s guest? – With help from my contact at The New Yorker, I am inviting Nicholson Baker for an interview. I hope he accepts, because I’ve admired his writing for a long time, and I’d like to learn if he’s still reading his Kindle after finishing work on the review heard round the Kindlesphere.

Comments 5

Al wrote:

Len – I didn’t go back to verify this but at one point I thought you said to “left click or ctrl-click on the Mac”… didn’t you mean “right click”? Also, many of us on the Mac dumped that single click mouse right away and are using the 3 button mouse with scroll wheel that most computer users use, so instead of “on the Mac” maybe you should be saying “ctrl-click with a single button mouse”.

Soosie, I just checked and could not find a web page for the Kindle survey, so I assume it was sent only on an email basis. BTW, a few days after receiving the Amazon survey I received an email survey purporting to be from Amazon that was clearly a fake – someone had generated it using SurveyMonkey. So beware!

I would love to loan my books to military service people if possible. I know you have that program to send Kindles. There is a website http://www.booksforyourkindle.com I have lent several and borrowed one through that site. Karen